In 1916 Joe Mack and a handful of fellow members found a stretch of rolling ground in Bloomfield Hills and decided it was where their club would live. They quickly hired Donald Ross, perhaps because Mack was a member at Detroit Golf Club, where Ross was then building 36 holes. Ross was taken with the Michigan land at once and gave it a blessing that has followed the place ever since: "The lord intended for this to be a golf course." He laid out the South in 1917, and by 1918 it was finished. It hosted the 1922 Western Open and then two U.S. Opens. For a while it was simply a beautiful Ross course on beautiful ground. Then the players began to outgrow it. Concerns about low scoring at the 1937 U.S. Open lingered, and before the 1951 Open Robert Trent Jones was brought in to toughen the course. The best players in the world arrived to find something they did not recognize, and Walter Hagen said the course was playing the players instead of the players playing the course. Ben Hogan won emphatically, and afterward said he had "brought this monster to its knees." The name stuck. Oakland Hills South became The Monster, and the work established Jones as the Open Doctor. The Monster stood for roughly seven decades, and it gathered a remarkable record. Gary Player won a PGA Championship here, and his shot into the 16th green became iconic. David Graham won a PGA here too. In 2004 the Ryder Cup came, with Hal Sutton captaining the Americans and Bernhard Langer the Europeans. It was a rout. Europe led 11-5 going into Sunday's singles, Sergio Garcia beat Phil Mickelson 3 and 2, and Colin Montgomerie secured the winning point against David Toms. Even the rookies Thomas Levet and Ian Poulter scored their first points, and Europe finished 18 1/2 to 9 1/2, a record-breaking victory. Four years later Rees Jones, the son of Robert Trent Jones, renovated the course, mainly the bunkering, and stretched the South past 7,300 yards for the 2008 PGA Championship. Only three players beat par. Padraig Harrington closed with two rounds of 66, beat Garcia by two, and became the first European to win consecutive majors. The most tender chapter came later, and it was not an easy one. Gil Hanse began advising the club in 2015, but his first master plan for restoring Ross's work, submitted in 2016, failed a club vote. The green committee kept making its case. Elsewhere, other prominent clubs were moving away from the Jones philosophy and restoring their courses, and two years later a revised plan passed. Hanse was commissioned in 2019, and the restoration was not met with unanimous praise within the club. There are fewer trees now. What Hanse's team had was a gift from 1929. The club owned a program from the U.S. Women's Amateur of that year, won by the great Glenna Collett, and it held photographs of all of Ross's original greens. Those pictures became the reference for the work. At the seventh, where the green had been moved to the right and a pond put in, the shaper Blake Conant found the original green pad in the rough with a cart path running through it, and recapturing the Ross hole became a far easier task. Not everything went back. The 15th and 16th greens are still Robert Trent Jones's, left from 1951. Hanse and the club judged the original 15th too severe and thought the Jones green quite good. At the 16th, much of Ross's strategy returned, but the green stayed, partly because of Player's shot. So the South is now mostly Ross, with a little of the Monster left in it, and it has returned to the ranks of the best courses in the country. Nine majors have been played here, and more are coming: U.S. Women's Opens in 2031 and 2042, and U.S. Opens in 2034 and 2051. The course still asks to be treated with respect.